UCU re-ballots amidst ferment

After a summer of confusion over strategy and unacceptable delays to a national re-ballot of members in the long-running University and College Union (UCU) dispute over pay and conditions, 42 branches struck in the week from 25 September.

The week was originally planned to be a national strike. An emergency meeting of the union’s Higher Education Committee decided to allow branches to opt out. That left 42 to fight on, many in pursuit of local fights against punitive deductions of pay for the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). The MAB ended in September when the industrial action mandate ran out.

To cut a long story short, both the original planned national action and the opt-out swerve, whatever criticisms can be made of it, were responses to the mess caused by a series of missteps and anti-democratic manoeuvring by the union’s leadership in the last year. The latest confusion has recently led to a number of branches passing motions of no-confidence in UCU general secretary Jo Grady.

Those motions are reasoned political criticism and attempts to hold a well-paid elected General Secretary to account. But Chris O’Donnell, a leading member of Commons, the faction that backs Grady, calls them misogyny.

Quoted in the Sunday Times (1 October) O’Donnell said: “Jo Grady is by any measure the most successful general secretary of recent times. What we are witnessing here is an aggressive and misogynistic attack by the Socialist Workers Party and the far left within the UCU.” Activists in the union should, of course, condemn any sexist personalised attacks on Grady or any other woman in an elected position. O’Donnell is using a charge of misogyny divisively, and, no doubt, timing it to help Grady escape responsibility and to boost her re-election campaign — one that will begin immediately after she’s spent time touring the country to get the vote out in the delayed re-ballot on industrial action (20 September to 3 November: the general secretary election will be in early 2024). He is wrong to do so.

Grady could have avoided a backlash if she had not obstructed the decisions and industrial strategy formed by elected committees — which included sustained industrial action and implementation of MAB earlier on in the last academic year — and let that strategy run its course. With hardline anti-union bosses, there is no guarantee that the democratically-agreed strategy would have fared better, but at least something more like the collective will of the union would now be taking responsibility for any results.

Meanwhile, the UCU is running its re-ballot (to 3 November) to continue the dispute and all efforts need to be focused on winning that.

At the same time some Unison higher education branches are striking (mostly 2-3 October) over 2022-3 pay and revving up for 2023-24. This is a national dispute. Only a minority of branches opted to ballot and got over the threshold. Nevertheless, from where Unison organisation in higher education used to be, the trend is positive.